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The SAVO Group launched a Web-based platform that is revolutionizing the way marketing and sales teams use technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness in driving revenue. Delivered as a hosted service, SAVO's Sales Asset Manager(TM) (SAM) automates the access, dynamic generation, delivery and management of customized marketing and sales assets-presentations, proposals, documents, brochures, e- mail, competitive intelligence and more. A result of SAVO's heritage as a custom solutions provider, SAM is already delivering powerful results for leading financial services and healthcare organizations.
Through SAM's intuitive interface, marketing achieves centralized control over-and time to be strategic in-the content, design and analytics of the materials and information that support the selling process. Meanwhile, sales gains access to the right materials at the right time-tailored in just a few clicks to more tightly align with customer needs or sales cycle stage-shifting focus to building relationships and closing deals.
By freeing resources from non-value-driving activities, empowering them to do what they do best, and establishing a single platform through which to collaborate, SAM helps sales and marketing grow business more quickly and effectively, as a team.
Deriving results from CRM and SFA
SAM enhances the value of CRM and SFA by going beyond administrative tasks, such as tracking customer contact, to improve the quality of the contact itself. By making this interaction more meaningful and customer specific, and by using time and resources most efficiently to do so, SAM accelerates the critical "last mile" of the sales process: from prospect to contract.
"Deploying CRM or SFA alone does not necessarily translate into sales effectiveness, because such solutions are designed to address pre- and post- sales business processes," said Sheryl Kingstone, Yankee Group program manager, CRM Strategies. "Companies that sell consultatively require tools that go beyond sales administration, reduce time spent on anything other than selling, and improve the effectiveness of efforts in front of the customer. This is clearly the next phase in the evolution of CRM."
Bridging the marketing/sales divide
SAM was designed for enterprise-level organizations with a centralized marketing function supporting a distributed sales force, including non- proprietary channels. In providing critical functionality for both groups, SAM empowers marketing and sales to work together to increase the revenue opportunity of each customer engagement.
"SAM addresses that deep disconnect that persists between marketing and sales in many organizations," said John Aiello, managing director, The SAVO Group. "It's a familiar challenge: sales ignores marketing's work by creating 'rogue' materials; marketing is pulled in countless directions handling 'one- offs', policing compliance and preaching brand consistency. Until now, even technologies have reflected the divide: separate tools help sales track contacts and marketing manage agencies and budgets. SAM is the first platform created specifically for marketing and sales together-one that is proving successful in uniting them around activities supporting business growth."
As organizations face ongoing pressure to improve bottom line results, the imperative to align teams takes on a new level of importance.
Sales and marketing teams often have very different views of the world-and of their company's sales and marketing collateral-leading to frustration, lack of consistency and productivity drains on both sides," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president, Nucleus Research. "SAM gives sales and marketing an easy way to play nice.'"
Facilitating analytics, cross-selling, compliance and more
In addition to delivering business-level benefits, SAM includes features that address key marketing and sales needs:
* Comprehensive, intuitive reporting tools provide previously untracked analytics about sales asset use, revealing market demand, customer activity, segment needs, product/service correlations and more. This insight enables marketers to further refine or develop content and to justify programs.
* A feedback submission feature allows sales to share experiences and best practices using specific materials with customers, and marketing to publish appropriate notes to asset metadata, facilitating knowledge-sharing.
* Required and suggested inclusion/exclusion rules for specific sales assets provide a powerful means to encourage cross selling and enforce legal and regulatory compliance requirements.
* The ability to import customer-specific data from data marts or other sources into sales assets automates customization especially valuable to relationship management activities such as account reviews.
* A search engine makes it possible for sales to quickly find the materials that best address a specific customer situation, stage in the relationship development process or keyword.
"Having all of our materials in one place, mapped to our sales process, with immediate access to critical data behind it, has transformed the way we market and sell," said Marlyn Cascarina, VP-sales operations for AmerisourceBergen. "SAM's invaluable feedback loop allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of every piece we create, as well as learn what's working and what's needed, which in turn drives new materials. Nothing else on the market today allows us to do this."
Ensuring a "perfect fit" through hands-on service
SAM is the result of SAVO's experiences working side-by-side with marketing and sales professionals to address challenges impacting the ability to collaboratively drive sales. This heritage as a custom solutions partner, not a product provider, has guided SAVO's unique service philosophy in delivering SAM: a commitment to a "perfect fit." A dedicated team leverages best practices to ensure a quick and seamless rollout, making available marketing and technical expertise, resources and support to help with sales asset writing and design, content organization, user training and more. As a result, SAVO's clients achieve substantial, measurable ROI quickly.
"Being able to demonstrate the value of a technology investment is imperative in today's business environment," said Nucleus Research's Wettemann. "With a combination of low initial costs, rapid deployment and a clear business impact not currently addressed by many CRM solutions, we've seen SAM deliver a payback to early adopters in a matter of months."
Configurable architecture, available now
SAM is a modular, hosted service, available today. Implementation is simple: no software installation or infrastructure changes are required and access can be provided through an intranet link, facilitating adoption. Organizations can maintain and customize the system-without calling on IT-to easily add, replace and remove sales assets and reflect branding guidelines, terminology and more. Built to be scalable and flexible, SAM can incorporate any kind of sales asset defined by an organization. Pricing varies and includes an initial set up and ongoing hosting fees. SAM also can be licensed for in-house deployment. For more information, contact The SAVO Group at 312.542.2000 or go to http://www.salesassetmanager.com.
22.06.2004, Contentmanager
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